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I like a shoot-em-up action flick as much as the next Bubbly Girl, and I wasn’t disappointed with "Inglourious Basterds." Of course, I could have done without some of the gore, but that’s to be expected from a Quintin Tarantino movie.

I was pleasantly surprised though to glimpse Perrier-Jouët champagne -- the anemone flower painted bottle known as the Cuvée Belle Epoque -- in a few scenes of the movie. The first I recall was at a restaurant where the Jewish heroine Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) dealing with the unwelcome attention of German war hero Frederick (Daniel Brühl) and finds herself being treated to fancy lunch with Nazi Joseph Goebbels. It shows up again in a fateful scene at a bar called La Louisiane and once more at the end of the movie, when Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and some of his men get dressed up in tuxes to take in a movie premiere.

Especially given the circumstances of this first scene and the others, there’s a feeling of desperate fin de siecle decadence, watching people gaily drink champagne from beautiful bottles as their country is overrun by invading troops.

Of course, while Inglourious Basterds is fiction, champagne did play a role in both World War I and II.